An upgraded version of Flickr introduced last week for Apple Inc.’s iPhone lets users share images with groups as well as edit, crop and apply color filters to photos, Brett Wayn, a vice president and general manager at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, said in an interview.

As a growing number of consumers use smartphone cameras to document their daily lives and share events with friends, Mayer is upgrading Flickr to compete with Twitter, which added photo-sharing tools to its mobile app last week, and Facebook, which bought the picture app Instagram earlier this year. Upgrades may help Flickr, with more than 80 million monthly users worldwide, attract more smartphone users in a handset market which researcher IDC projects will surge 45 percent to 717.5 million units this year.

Flickr is “a brand and product that’s absolutely associated with people who love creating and sharing and discovering photographs,” Wayn said.

Earlier last week week, Yahoo upgraded its email service to be faster and easier to navigate on the Internet, smartphones and tablets.

Mayer plans to invest in hiring engineers with expertise in mobile applications, boosting the company’s technology for buying and serving ads, and building services that are more personalized for individual users.

Flickr’s new image editing tools were created in partnership with Aviary Inc., a New York-based photo-app developer that also helped create similar features for Twitter’s mobile app.

Following Mayer’s appointment to CEO in July, a Flickr user created a website with the address dearmarissamayer.com. It contained the message: “Make Flickr Awesome Again.” That’s a plea that the company has heard, said Wayn.